Seven

Ten years ago, I read the book Made to Stick, enthralled. This week, I read another book of Chip Heath: Making Number Counts. This is even more entertaining. 

The best secret to take away from this book is nobody really understands numbers. We can recognize 1, 2, and 3 at a glance, or 5 if we’re lucky. But after that, we can’t picture the numbers past 5, and would much prefer to know that the 2020 Australian wildfires affecting “half the size of Japan” and not “186,000 square kilometers.” 

To use an example of communicating with patient about platelet count, we might say, “A normal platelet count ranges from 150,000 to 450,000 platelets per microliter of blood. Your recent blood work showed that your platelet count is 40,000. That’s way too low.” 

It’s hard, right? After all, our patients don’t need to know exactly how many platelets are in a microliter. They only need meaningful landmarks. 

A better way of mapping the landscape would be: “Normal scores for platelet counts are expressed in thousands, and they range between 150 to 450. At 50, we won’t let you travel. At 10, you’re at risk for spontaneous bleeding. You’re at 40.” 

That’s neat and simple. Nothing more and nothing less.

Speaking of which, there’s one more lesson about converting abstract numbers into concrete objects in this book. It’s the example of understanding electricity consumption. To help people grasp the idea of carbon fluorescent light-bulbs, we can’t simply state that carbon fluorescent light-bulbs cost seven time more than traditional incandescent bulbs. We have to emphasize that they use only a quarter of electricity. Another focus would be the ease of replacement, because carbon fluorescent light-bulbs are expected to last for 7 years; that’s way better than replacing bulbs every year, particularly for those hard-to-get-to sockets. Now, how can we craft an easier-to-understand concept about 7 years? 

“Replace your lights with carbon fluorescent light-bulbs when your child is learning how to walk. The next time you’d have to replace the bulb, your child would be in second grade, learning about oxygen. The next time, they’d be taking driver’s ed.”

Ten

Each year, then Nature's 10 list highlights the stories of people behind major science development over the past year. That's the top 10 stories of science, technology, engineering and medicine, which are shaping our world.

There are countless top 10 topics at the end of each December. Think of your top 10 lists, or even top 10 school acquaintances, top 10 Instagram posts. 

For my rankings, I like to rate the top 10 books I have read each year. Here are mine:

Uptime by Laura Mae Martin

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

James by Percival Everett

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up by Evanna Lynch

An Immense World by Ed Young

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike

From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life by Arthur C. Brooks 

Recovery

Many people fall in love with running and travel at the same time. Ask those Aussies running from Bondi to Coogee beaches and you know what I mean. The equivalent for Hong Kong runners would be the iconic MacLehose Trail stretching from San Kung to Tuen Mun.

After my fall injury at another trail one week ago, I decided to take a break and slow down. That's part of the reason I went for a walk – instead of run – along the Section 4 of the MacLehose Trail today. The chance to stretch my legs and savour the scenic vistas, by itself, is mesmerising. 

As I picked up the pace near the midpoint of my route and made a dash up a few steps with my recovering left knee, there's something inexplicably satisfying about a short run without pain. I dared not to run too much, giving way to a sort of modesty. More importantly, an entirely humble feeling of gratitude. 

Reunion

Long gone were the days when my daughter's friends stay close all the time. Long gone was even the thought of a reunion.

Their friends and classmates go everywhere, from Malaysia to Ottawa. I started my morning round a quarter past seven this morning, as I wished to join her reunion with friends returning for winter break. The four of them had been studying the same class since kindergarten. Two of them study in the same school now, and two in Canada.

Am I hearing their laughter after all these years today? Yeah, I am. Their laughter never leaves you wondering the half life of friendship. That's what I and she treasure. Very much.

Wedding

Oh, to be a reader during festive holiday. Just don't want to have topics that are too serious. 

As previously recommended by the New York Times, the story by Alison Esbach gives us the option of learning through books rather than lecture courses. Her new novel The Wedding People is a deeply satisfying one.

The comedic plot of a week-long wedding party, in a nineteenth-century hotel sitting on the edge of a cliff at Rhode Island, isn't to crack jokes but to engage in an interweaving journey of different guests. The story has become funnier in direct proportion to the darkness of guest's life including one recently divorced adjunct literature professor who wished to kill herself. 

The book becomes an absurdly revelatory exploration of how we should learn to take care of our own needs, and then our encounters.

Choice

If there’s a rule in our life task, I suppose it would be best gleaned from the Grant Study, which followed the lives of hundreds of Harvard-educated men. That is a longitudinal study tracking people all the way from undergraduate class to their death, decades later.

In his book How To Know a Person, the New York Times Opinion columnist David Brooks described the study findings and mentioned how a person moves from core task to a leadership position. A teacher in the classroom, for instance, goes on to become an administrator in the office. A reporter goes on to be an editor. 

Not all of us can accept or like these promotions. Many a time, teachers love direct interaction with students and prefer to preserve their sense of self. All choices involve loss: If you take administration job, you don’t take that teaching one. Administration duty takes people away from the core task that lets a teacher fall in love with the profession in the first place. It really is impossible to know which job is a better one. Listening to your heart is one way, but be prepared that the second job on the next rung is often paid better.

Body

The biggest joy with trail running comes from putting one leg ahead of another on rugged terrain. The biggest mistake is going too quick, as I learned yesterday from the training with my running partner along the Hong Kong Trail. With lush green shaded paths, imposing panoramic views of beach, reservoirs and isles, it's hard to pass up the opportunity if you're ever given one, and more so if the partner happens to be a kidney transplant patient of mine. And whilst first-timers might feel more comfortable soaking up the beauty of nature without adrenaline, there will always be people like me who prefers to strive for speed. 

Whoa, I crossed the finish line with multiple wounds and a swollen knee from tripping.

My daughter couldn't help reading me an essay after seeing what had happened to my body. That's about a runner's determined descent at breakneck speed. "Time stopped," the paragraph begins, "a protruding branch yanked at Benson's ankle. Gravity ripped Benson down to the ground. The crowd silenced, and now the only noise that could be heard was a sickening crack of Benson's bones upon the ground. He didn't move again." I wanted to correct her reading: Wait a sec, Jasmine, that story's not about Benson. It's me.

This reminds me of the thriller novel All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham. She writes with ravaging bluntness about the body feelings. It is a torture with knowing spouse's extramarital affairs, she tells us. "My nails squeezing into my sides, making it hurt.," she observes, "I imagined them leaving little crescent-shaped slits in my stomach like bite marks, sinking deep into my skin." 

The author describes the feeling of divorce such as forgetting the smell of aftershave in detail. "Not anymore, though. Now, whenever I see him, I taste something metallic. Like sucking into pennies or licking a fresh wound, tasting blood on my tongue."

That's the essence of crafting story: utterly body sensation.

Ride

Listen: Jasmine has turned fifteen. 

She has come up with her own way to celebrate her birthday this year. Her idea to ride bike for 20 kilometres along the waterfront is a special way to hang out with friends. 

A dad or mum knows very well this means fun for teenagers exclusively. We simply offered backup for the girls: we figured out the way to gather enough bikes for six of them (including Locobike from bike-sharing provider), the means to transport the bikes to the starting point, and the many quinceañero what-ifs.

And that's it. That's what parents should do. When our daughter grows up, we stay close enough but not too close. 

I spent the morning hiking Hong Kong Trail, but didn't go all the way till late afternoon in case she needs help. Well, she didn't.

Wonderland

Long ago, when I first visited Long Valley in the northern part of Sheung Shui, I was fascinated by this astonishingly beautiful freshwater agricultural wetland habitat. This is virtually synonymous with birds' paradise.

The little and great egrets, grey herons, white wagtails, and sandpipers have kept me coming back with my camera. Arguably the cutest water bird, the black-winged stilt is a species that is delightful to watch and take pictures. I enjoy hearing them calling, watching them swing bills side to side in water for meals. Viewing the long-legged waders is comforting beyond words: elegant in poise, earthy and mysterious all at once.

All of which sounds just dandy. But when I went again two years ago, the construction site workers told me off. My heart skipped a beat after seeing the "ongoing construction" sign. I began to wonder what this might mean in the context of endangered ecosystem. It's no secret that North America has lost 3 billion birds from habitat loss and climate change in the past 50 years. It is no better in Hong Kong. The proposed San Tin Technopole near the border with mainland China could have threatened the survival of up to 117 bird species. That means the loss of a bird habitat area nearly 7 times the size of Long Valley.

I don't remember how I trepassed the enclosed area for a quick farewell to black-winged stilts. It hardly matters. I'd felt the same jolt of disappointment as Alice's wonderland adventure when she came upon a great hallway lined with locked doors. She happened to find a key to open a small door, and began to cry after she realised she could not fit through the door. 

The pool of Alice's tears somehow led her to shrink and enter the garden. The same can be said of the voice of Hong Kong environmental groups: that's more or less similar to the crying of Alice. Tears might or might not work in real life. I returned to Long Valley this weekend after the good news that it's now reopened and established as the Long Valley Nature Park. That seems promising, but I told myself to get prepared for unpredictable future, like what Alice encountered after falling down a rabbit hole. 

Productivity

For most scientists, bringing play into lives holds the key to true productivity. I learned from Ali Abdaal's revolutionary book Feel-Good Productivity how Richard Feynman came to work out quantum electrodynamics from playing with throwing plates up in the air, watching the wobbling plates. 

According to Ali Abdaal, seriousness is overrated. If we don't want to ruin our lives, the first step is to be less serious and reduce the power of fear. 

Well, that's comforting. To cite one of the rules he suggested, Ali Abdaal's 10/10/10 rule is worth remembering. That refers to three simple questions we can ask ourselves after setback. Say, you fail your first driving test. Or, you don't get hired for a job. Will this matter in 10 minutes? Maybe. We might feel a bit down. Will this matter in 10 weeks? Probably not (because you are going to apply to a bunch of other jobs or have booked another test by then). Will this matter in 10 years? Definitely not.

But again, he does not ask us to look too far ahead for everything. Looking too distant might not be easy for improving productivity. A short-term horizon or near-term goal is more likely to boost our energy. Instead of focus on "lose 20 pounds by the end of this year", we can look closer and strive for "exercise for 30 minutes daily".

The long and short of it is that we try to look distant if we get bogged down, and look closer if we want to get started. 

Runner

There's nothing quite like reading a runner's journey learning to run – and to live – like a Greek. That's how and why I borrowed the book The Art of Running by Andrea Marcolongo, who learned Ancient Greek at her liceo classico at the age of fourteen, and started her instinct to run along the Seine at the age of thirty-two. 

The author experienced the vital impulse at a similar age as Haruki Murakami (who started to run at the age of thirty-three, the age that Jesus Christ died, the age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill). That has a lot to do with the fear of aging. She trained hard to run the marathon in Marathon. For history buffs and runners, the small town of Marathon needs little introduction; this is where the Athenian herald Pheidippides had started his run to Athens. Andrea Marcolongo insisted on running to see the Giants and Lapiths atop the Parthenon with her own two eyes, standing on her own two legs.

I love the way Andrea Marcolongo described running: that is her way to prove that she still has time, that adulthood (read: old age) is relative, that there is no end to youth if we dedicate ourselves to staying in shape.

Fiction

Weird – and no doubt controversial – as it may sound, a book from fictional genre can resemble an autobiography. 

Sigrid Nunez, an American writer, wrote her seventh novel The Friend in the first person voice. In the middle of reading this story of a woman mourning the suicide of a close friend and taking in his bereft dog, I had to look back at the call number on the spine of the library book. I checked the letter F and convinced myself it's indeed a fiction, and not a memoir.

Writers like Proust, Isherwood, Duras, Knausgård, are particularly skilful in handling fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction. As Sigrid Nunez quips, "When someone asks why a highly unconventional book is called a novel, the author responds it's a novel because he says it is."

Security

Kiley Reid's book Such a Fun Age is a page turner about race and class.

The story is about a Black babysitter, Emira, who was accused by an upscale grocery store security guard. The security guard suspected Emira to be a kidnapper of a white toddler. The scene of tense standoff – security guard pointing finger at Emira's face, and rebuttal "The fuck are you doing? Don't touch me!" from Emira holding a two-year-old girl – was filmed by a white man holding his cell phone.

Emira didn't want to keep the video and asked for deletion of the footage. Things got complicated when it turns out that video had been leaked and went viral. Emira Googled black girl grocery store video and was appalled by thousand entries of comment on Twitter. 

The novel isn't about cybersecurity but Emira's friend's comments serve as a lens through which I learn to to be careful. Emira's friend Zara asked the key questions on safeguarding digital data.

"Who the fuck did you send this to?"

"Did someone steal your phone?"

"Look at me. Did your phone get hacked?"

"Is it on the cloud? Or on a drive or a shared folder?" 

"Are you sure he deleted it that night? Did he delete if from his Sent folder? Did you make sure?"

Age

When I was preparing a lecture for geriatric medicine, I heard the news of President-elect of the United States at the age of seventy-eight. 

Should there be an age limit for the election? 

Yes, I know, that might seem like comitting the sin of ageism. Still, I have to say that there is nowadays an imbalance of power that favors the old. 

It is not just in politics that our performance peaked when we were relatively young. This is also true in science and mathematics, according to the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan who discovered the structue of ribosome. In his book Why We Die, he talked about people working into their seventies or eighties – or even longer – with unwillingness to admit getting old. 

Surrounded by scientists trying to hang on for as long as they can, Venki Ramakrishnan discussed the time when our creative powers peak. The first answer that came to his mind was the age when scientist did their best work. For Nobel Prize winners, they nearly always make their key breakthroughs when they are young and not very powerful. 

Next, he turned to the most innovative companies (think Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the artificial intelligence company DeepMind): they were started by people in their twenties or thirties.

The same was true of literature. Kazuo Ishiguro said it was hard to find cases where an author's most renowned work had come after the age of forty-five. If you aren't convinced, think about War and Peace, Ulysses, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights. These novels were all written by writers in their twenties and thirties. 

No wonder more than 1.2 million people marched in France last year to protest against the government's proposal to raise the retirement age a mere two years from sixty-two to sixty-four. Dosen't it make sense?

Collection

Reading books from black-belt storytellers has improved my way of crafting sentences – thanks to my habit of collecting – after jotting down memorable paragraphs from their books.

I can't think of a good reason, but I like collections. One of my vocabulary building hobbies, as an early reader at junior grades, is writing new words (and their meaning from dictionary) on a notebook. That's not all. As I'm getting older, I use my smartphone or laptop to copy good sentences every time I dive into reading.

The joy of collecting good sentences is best captured by my recent reading Martyr! from an Iranian American poet and novelist. Kaveh Akbar has extraordinary skill in writing metaphors. One good example is his way of depicting a crowded studio. He didn't state the size of the studio. He wrote it like this: I lived in a studio so small I could smell my neighbour's farts. 

I couldn't help laughing and copying. 

Leaf by Leaf

Autumn colours draw phenomenal crowds to Japan outdoor areas for the foliage, most prized of all being the maples. It's hard to resist. My wife and I have been grateful for the chance to view the vibrant colours during Kamikōchi trip this autumn. 

Calendar checking is getting more difficult when the climate change has pushed back the peak of autumn leaf season over the past decades. A study in the United States has confirmed delayed arrival of red maple leaf colours by more than a month since the 19th century.

Have you thought about the reason of leaves turning yellow and red? As the award-winning author Tristan Gooley told us, nature is not a whimsical artist splashing variety onto our landscape in the hope of winning prizes for creativity. According to his book How to Read a Tree, there must be a reason for every one of the differences we see. 

Next time you see leaves turning yellow, you know it is a negative effect: you see yellow, but you're actually looking at an absence of green. These are times when trees draw chlorophyll from their leaves back into themselves: the trees dare not waste such as a valuable resource as daylight hours decrease. Much like a photographer putting back camera after dark, the trees have evolved an adaptation strategy to prepare for winter. On the flip side, some trees like oak and maple produce sugars during the day that are then trapped inside by longer, cooler nights. The sugars lead to the production of pigments, such as anthocyanins, which serve as their "sunscreen", so to speak, when their chlorophyll is recycled. The anthocyanins are what make maple trees look red and attractive to us during autumn.

Kamikōchi

Kamikōchi has been revered as Japan's answer to the Yosemite or Patagonia. Even I have neither been to Sierra Nevada nor South America, I have to agree that Kamikōchi is the Holy Grail for hiking enthusiasts. 

Situated at an elevation of 1,500 metres and along the banks of the crystal-clear Azusa-gawa, Kamikōchi is also known as the "Japanese Alps", a term popularised by the English missionary and conservationist Reverend Walter Weston. The town's popularity spiked in 1927 with the release of Kappa, a novella set in Kamikōchi and written by the Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

My wife and I had an enjoyable four-hour walk in Kamikōchi today, eyeing the peaks of Mt Yake-dake and Mt Okuhotaka-dake. 

As your travel guide tells you, it wouldn't be Japan without the crowds. Timing is everything. To beat the crowd, we took our breakfast around 7 and caught the bus early. Many passengers got off the bus near Taishō-ike pond for leisure walk, and we decided to hike upriver to Myōjin-ike before heading back. While privacy may not be a big part of the hiking experience, perfect weather is. We counted ourselves exceptionally lucky to have Kamikōchi hiking on a day with the best sunny period within this week. 

Autumn

To call Shirakawa-gō a popular site would be a massive understatement. This is where iconic wooden farmhouse with steep, gabled thatched-roof designs are preserved. The Unesco World Heritage-listed villages are often filled with tourists. round the year. So much so that tourists vastly outnumber locals in Takayama.

As we headed to the famous Tenshukaku Observatory lookout, we had been prepared for disappointment because we weren't sure if it's closed. And it is. My wife decided to drive along the road instead of turning back. That would be a route different from what we had planned. As we followed the Google Map to head for Hida City, we'd noticed that we were having an epic drive along the Amou Mountain Pass. The 50-minute journey runs through Amou Prefecture Natural Park blessed with beautiful marshlands and bursts of autumn colours.

We didn't know how lucky we are until we checked the website: this road is going to be closed within one week as winter approaches. 

Monet

After years of struggling as an artist, Claude Monet became wealthy by the age of 43, when he could afford to rent a large garden 75 kilometres from Paris. That's how his passion for the pond in Giverny turned into the most impressive sights of waterlilies and weeping willows.

I was at least ten years older than Monet when I discovered a pond in Japan bearing an uncanny resemblance to the pond owned by the Father of Impressionism. My wife and I traveled to Gifu today, when our daughter took her school trip to Chengdu. 

Anyone with the slightest fondness for the famous painter's garden won't want to miss the pond known officially as "Namonaki-ike", meaning "the pond of no name." This breathtaking piece of nature has now earned the nickname "Monet's Pond." No doubt the drawcard for us is the much less costly airfare than that of flying to France. An extra bonus is to find peace and quiet around this pond; it's less famous and won't be swamped with tourists by busload. 

Anatomy

Flesh forgets: bone remember.

That's a famous quote from the forensic thriller writer Jon Jefferson. Sue Black, a Scottish forensic anthropologist and anatomist, cited this on the first page of her book Written in Bone.  

It has taken me almost one month to finish the book, which runs its chapters from brain box all the way to the foot. Being a doctor, I shouldn't have problem with reading her detailed depiction of bones with brutal trauma or finger bone crumbled to ashes after fire accident. 

Still, the stories are somewhat uncomfortable. That's too much for me to read too many chapters within a day. Reading forensic stories at bedtime is even worse, unless you're fine with being jolted awake suddenly at night. I would certainly hope not.

But then, occasionally, I read something that resonated with my personal experience. And probably that of many medical interns too. Sue talked about an oncology nurse who had spent so much time over the years trying to find the veins on the backs of patients' hands that she had come to recognise them by their hands and jewellery as much as by their faces. That's at least some sense of humanity.

ETC

Whether you're first-time visitor to Japan or a frequent flyer to Narita Airport, you can often be caught by surprise. There's an unmistakably wide range of etiquette. Shoes on stone, socks on wood. Onsen tidbits. Do's and don'ts on public transport. Japanese toilets for dummies. The list goes on and on.

The peculiarity of Japan has been a favourite topic of Western observers. I kept laughing when I read the book Abroad in Japan, written by Chris Broad. Chris is a British filmmaker and YouTuber who started his nerve-racking job teaching English in a foreign country without any knowledge of Japanese. 

His six-hour drive road trip to meet snow monkeys reminded me of our puzzle with the toll payment system few years ago. Both Chris and I didn't know their electronic chip system called ETC. That card, once inserted in the onboard unit inside the car, allows wireless toll payment along most of Japan's expressways and highways. Similar to Chris, we were trapped as my wife pulled up to a tollbooth with no means to pay with cash. We poked our head out of the window, flashed our credit card and kept failing to pay, We didn't understand any single sentence of what the Japanese toll booth operator was talking about.

The line of cars pulling up behind us could have been longer than those behind Chris. Anyhow, the long line of traffic ended up pushing both our family and Chris to drive throttle down the motorway without paying the toll. 

Like Chris, I will never forget the flame burning on the head of the toll-booth man who stood in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

Uptime

Few tasks in history were as painfully eternal as that of Sisyphus, who kept rolling a boulder for eons. And the chance of calling an end to the repetitive cycle is zero. 

Yet I think emptying the email inbox in the modern era isn't any better task. Ever since human beings invented this communication tool, we have been destined to get caught up in the never-ending cycle of scrolling, checking notifications of the mail box, and opening unread emails.

As much as it pains me to admit it, I have been messy in managing the incoming emails. If you recall unanswered mails that you had expected from me, you aren't alone. In case there is a fine for owing each person's reply mail, I should have applied for bankruptcy years ago. Ask my secretary and she will testify the number of my debts (not to mention her secret wish that each hundred of reminders can earn her travel mileage). 

Call me procrastinator or lazy, but a handful of practical tips have recently brought joy back to working through my inbox. First I learned from my mentor how to avoid distraction from checking mails too frequently and too randomly. His strategy of checking emails only two or three times a day is eye-opening.  Next, my boss shared with me his approach to writing and responding to emails. In short, he keeps the emails short (not more than two lines) and responds to all emails within twenty-four hours. He always reply to emails quickly to let the sender know that he received the email, what he plans to do about it, and when. Neat.

To this end, the best lessons have come from Laura Mae Martin, Google's Executive Productivity Advisor, who wrote the book Uptime. Her laundry method of handling emails is simple and neat. That means creating three laundry baskets for my inbox. The three essential baskets refer to Respond (those emails that require a response and need my time to complete), Read (something that I'd like to read but don't need to respond to), and Revisit (something that I cannot immediately respond to because I'm waiting for a specific time to check in or I'm waiting for someone else to respond). I learn to sort the incoming mails like sorting my laundry, folding clothes, hanging clothes, and matching socks. 

Talk about inefficient use of energy and time, and you can imagine the random laundry sorting. That would be like opening a dryer door, picking out one shirt, folding the shirt, going to put in dresser, walking back to the dryer to find a pair of pants but throw it back because it still seems a bit damp, finding one sock but don't feel like hunting for the other sock, switching gear to find a pair of pants - oh wait, it's the same pair of damp pants I already touched, and on and on.

Hike

Hiking or running is the only sport – the only one I know of, anyway – for which you need nothing more than a pair of shoes. It may be true that, in most circumstances, you can find someone to go together. Sure, you might. 

If I go hiking, I can go on my own, or with family and friends. Hiking alone entails a healthy dose of strenuous exercise. My solo hiking can often go as much as 20 kilometres' walk, double the usual distance covered with companion.

Which is why I have downloaded a mobile phone app designed by Hong Kong police. The track function and rescue signal from the app, after successfully passing a field test in a Dubai desert, should have better safety for hikers.

In the first week of October, I hiked for six hours, from Tai Po Kau Nature Reserve to Ng Tung Chai Waterfalls via MacLehose Trail. Two weeks later, I hiked with my secondary school friends and started our trek near Ng Tung Chai, heading for Tai To Yan (or "Big Knife Cliff" in Chinese). When I emerged on a ridge at the ninth highest peak in Kong Kong with sweeping views over Sha Tau Kok, I could see all the way to Shenzhen in the north. Little did I know, just two days later, I'd be hiking to that area, close to the village near Kai Kuk Shue Ha with my wife and daughter.

And yes, the mercury hasn't seemed to dip even it's October now. Yet one thing is certain. I have had the good fortune and opportunity to enjoy the hikes. 

Measuring

"The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured," the market analyst Morgan Housel once wrote.

This applies to so many things.

Imagine a world where every decision is made on a spreadsheet, where we simply add up the numbers and get the answer. That's never going to happen, simply because that’s not how the world works.

Ask the British physiologist Archibald Hill, and he will tell you this is indeed not the case. Hill, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1922 for his work in understanding body mechanics, ran every morning at 7:15. He was a keen runner. Hill believed that maximum running performance is a function of an athlete's muscles – overwhelmingly their heart. A stronger heart pump more blood to transport oxygen to running muscle. That seems logical and straightforward. 

In the real world, Hill's calculations had almost zero ability to predict Olympic sprints or marathon race winners. 

With time, Hill realised there is more in athletics than sheer chemistry. He discovered that human bodies aren't machines. Human have feelings, emotions, and fears, all of which are very hard to measure. 

In other words, the world is not one big spreadsheet whose outputs can be computed. We'd never get anywhere if everyone view the world as a clean set of numbers to be computed.

Always been the case, always will be.

Touching

It's not a common order: a movie comes first and then the book is written. So begins the novelization of the screenplay or movie named Five Feet Apart. The story is a testament to the power of human touch. 

I happened to follow the same order this weekend, watching the movie with my daughter and finishing the novel the next day. 

Two teenagers, Stella and Will, met in a hospital where they received treatment for a genetic disorder of cystic fibrosis. A genetic defect in the protein called ion channel, spanning the cell membrane lining the lungs, causes thickened mucus. Through thick and thin, children and young adults with cystic fibrosis struggle to move air in and out of their lungs.

There turned out to be an extraordinary bond between these two teenagers with cystic fibrosis, one of them not eligible for lung transplant after harbouring a hardy bacterium Burkholderia cepacia. The other one, Stella, knew very well B. cepacia thrives best in saliva or phlegm. A cough travels six feet. That means Stella should keep a distance of five, if not six, feet from Will to keep herself clean and eligible for lung transplant. No saliva also means no kissing.

The "six-feet-at-all-times" rule reminds us the brutal social distancing as a result of the coronavirus not too long ago. That's simply defying the deepest connection of human touch. 

Rhino

Ask anyone what their favourite animal is and chances are it won't be rhino. White rhino population is shrinking. And fast. It's now endangered. 

Ask poachers and aphrodisiac black market customers and they will tell you rhinoceros horn is the most precious Viagra.

The maths is hard to ignore. Having been decimated by poaching, the northern white rhino population is now down to two individual females. After the death of Suni and Sudan, the world's last two male northern white rhino in 2014 and 2018 respectively, scientists have been working incredibly hard to achieve in vitro fertilisation rhino pregnancy.

First things first, why are people in China so obsessed with the sex symbol of male rhino? Their lightning bolt penis, I mean. Thanks to (or perhaps because of) the two-and-a-half-foot long penis of the rhino male, rhinos have been erroneously believed – at least by some stupid guys – to be the king of sex.

A long time ago, people have witnessed the typical two and a half hours of rhino mating. My goodness, that sounds like extremely impressive sexual prowess of the male rhinos. Except that it isn't.

Ask any evolutionary scientists and they will tell us that rhinos are terrible at reproducing themselves. Rhinos take long to complete copulation – but not in the way you might think. The true story is that a female rhino has a very convoluted vagina that the rhino male has difficulty in delivering their sperms. So much so that the rhino males have evolved a long penis and taken a clumsy difficult time to make the darn things work. That explains the two and a half hours error-prone mating. 

When we know more about the reproductive disadvantage, it is not hard to see why the rhinos need IVF. There's nothing wrong (and plenty right) with stopping the horrible trade of rhino horn. Which, as we know, does nothing but to make people impotent and sterile.

Disaster

At a dinner once, with friends who included a reporter, our conversation turned into a Burmese joke. 

A man with toothache goes overseas to see a dentist. "Don't you have dentists back in Burma?" the dentist asks. 

"Of course," the man replies, "We're just not allowed to open our mouths."

It's no secret that today many of us feel that it's harder to open our mouths and to foster a supportive environment when we need it most. 

This month, I heard a dentist story that I'll never forget. That's from Rebecca Makkai's novel The Great Believers. A page turner about the early AIDS crisis in the mid-80s. 

At that time, there was no effective medication except a palliative drug known as AZT for the group of gay men who were grappling with the deadly disease in Chicago. One by one, they died when the doctor had no choice but to start hospice, taking off the medication like pentamidine and amphoterrible. One day, a man named Julian was packing for his flight to Puerto Rico, after being tested and told his positive ELISA results. Devastated, Julian picked up a white trapezoidal dental floss container and held it in his palm. He said, "Why do I have this? No, really, why did I pack this? I'm never flossing again."

"Sure you are," Julian's friend hoped to encourage him.

"I'm telling you that I have decided not to. Like, right now. I've hated it my whole life, and what's gonna happen to my gums in the next six months?"

"You've got much longer than that."

"You think any dentist is even treating me again? I've got no dentist to yell at me! I'm never going in for another cleaning!"

I will never forget this sad story about Julian. Few things are harder than defining the word stigma, and few things are easier than spotting stigmatisation when it has happened. 

Xiamen

Deciding between running and photography in a foreign city is never easy for me. In fact, I love both, and passionately believe that either activity is the logical choice during good weather.

Before I visited Xiamen this week, I grabbed a Lonely Planet guide to learn more about the city. This seaside city is the crown jewel of Fujian province. One of the highlights is the prestigious Xiamen International Marathon held annually along the coast offering breathtaking views. With its Elite Platinum Label rating by World Athletics, the route has become known as one of the most scenic and most sought-after marathon courses. 

That appears to be an attractive route for me to build more mileage. Well, sure, but that doesn't fit with my tight conference schedule – which is why I could at most run around my hotel for less than an hour. To make sure I can hit the mark with ample time to dry my sweaty running socks and clothes, I knew it would be wise not to run on the day of departure. 

Running on the pavements, on the other hand, can be a challenge. Much of this has to do with tackling the traffic, or for that matter, traffic lights. As I ran randomly outside my hotel this morning, I found a perfect trail stretching 23 kilometres, with most of the path on a bridge. That means I could run easily on a signposted foot bridge. As designed by Danish architecture firm Dissing+Weitling, the elevated track has been blessed with lookout platforms, fitness stations and restrooms alongside. Forget the gym treadmill – there’s enough here to keep a runner entertained for as long as one wishes.

Bats

What will be your reaction to bats?

The most common one is an involuntary shudder, as what a friend of mine had during our stroll near Adelaide Zoo. That's where a camp of grey-headed flying foxes is found. As we looked up, we saw many noisy creatures hanging upside down like what humans did from a chin-up bar but without falling  – and her heart started racing. She almost had a heart attack.

Beliefs about bats are entangled with mixed reactions, from that of vampires and Count Dracula to the symbol of long life and happiness. 

The success story of bats happens to be the theme of recent August issue of National Geographic. The article will change your impression of this creepy mammal. Among them, one of evolution's success stories is bats' adaptation, evolving from tree gliders to the only mammals that fly. Bat flight is a prime example of engineering design. They don't consciously make every split-second decision to navigate in a small dark cave. The soft tissue of bat wings simply deforms and reshapes in response to air pressure without need to bother their brain's air traffic control centre. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi will call that flow, and engineers call that passive dynamics. 

Another superpower of bats is their extreme longevity. As one of the smallest mammals, bats actually live up to 10 times longer than expected for their body size. How can that be? They are able to shut down their metabolism when at rest. The most amazing achievement of bats, if you ask doctors, is their immunity against a host of viruses. Ebola is one. Marburg virus is another. Their exceptional ability to live with the pathogens without falling sick or showing symptoms, according to most scientists, is an evolutionary advantage when bats live in extremely dense populations.

Immortal

The first lecture on kidney transplant was about perfusion during my conference today. Perfusion – the imperfect art and science of keeping an organ alive after it has been removed from a human body – is striving for vitality of an organ without blood and oxygen supply. The technique isn’t perfect, but hopefully can buy time for the transplant team to find the matched organ transplant recipients. For patients, they can recover quicker with better quality of the kidney organ. For surgeons, they can get some sleep after the first organ recovery surgery, before the second transplant surgery.

The perfusion machine and technology seem promising. Even so, perfusion keeps a donated organ alive outside the body for a finite number of hours. That's why I found the story of immortal human cells of Henrietta Lacks astonishing. Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman who died of an aggressive cervical cancer at the John Hopkins. She could not go elsewhere for treatment in 1951, because that was the only charity hospital accepting black patients at the era of Jim Crow. If Henrietta showed up at white-only hospital, she would have been sent away. At Hopkins, she could at least be segregated in coloured wards, the only place black patients were allowed to go.

To this day no one’s entirely sure why her full-fledged tumour wasn’t picked up when she delivered a baby two months prior to the diagnosis. Not even at the six weeks' return visit postpartum. There’s no way of knowing exactly what happened during her checkups. Rebecca Skloot, who authored a science biography of Henrietta Lacks, wasn't sure, too.

George Gey, head of tissue culture research at Hopkins, had been trying for years to develop the perfect culture medium – not a perfusion machine, not yet – to keep cells growing outside a human body. That means liquid recipe like witches’ brews to feed cells in a test tube or Petri dish. He tried the plasma of chickens, purée of calf fetuses, special salts and blood from human umbilical cords.

Hailed as “the world’s most famous vulture feeding on human specimens”, George Gey drove to local slaughterhouses at least once a week to collect cow foetuses and chicken blood. His ongoing experiment to find the perfect medium was never successful, until he took a sliver of cervix tumour from Henrietta Lacks. George Gey’s assistant dutifully labeled the culture using the first two letters of the patient's first and last names. That means HeLa for Henrietta and Lacks. Unlike other human cells, her cells kept growing and turned not the immortal HeLa cell line.

The success of HeLa cells in scientific contribution is infinite. On the other hand, the tarnished story of biomedical research by exploitation of vulnerable subjects without consent turned out to be a legacy that lasted forever.

Adelaide

Being invited to give talks in scientific meeting in Australia is an honour. The only two reasons to accept the invitation – and they’re good ones – are intellectual exchange and chance to visit Adelaide.

Even though there isn’t direct flight into Adelaide Airport, travel to Adelaide is easy. I slept through the journey soon after watching one documentary by David Attenborough on the plane. By the time of landing, I realised my missing the meals.

That didn’t matter. I was happy enough to have arrived one day before the conference. There has never been a more exciting time to explore the city before long days of conference. I headed straight to forest walk on arriving at Adelaide this afternoon, skipping breakfast and lunch. 

My pick was Waterfall Gully surrounding Cleland National Park. The trail to Mt Lofty Summit through steep hills and stingybark forests is every Adelaidian's favourite climb. That's where I saw many cardio crusaders and sweaty joggers. That's where I listened to birdsongs of golden whistlers and chirps of superb blue wrens. That's the best welcome event for an academic conference.

Woman

Not all stories are epic. They can be as simple as a mother-daughter story like A Thousand Splendid Suns, that takes place in Afghan society. Or else, a story about three generations of Palestinian women, as what I have read in Etaf Rum's novel A Woman is No Man.

The title of the novel, by itself, is telling a good story.

And yes, that would be an immediate answer to any Palestine girl who asks why she can't do so-and-so.

"Because. You can't compare yourself to your brothers. You're not a man."

"Fair or not, no girl is going to college."

"A woman will always be a woman."

Although I can't find a satisfying ending from the novel, I have witnessed the courage of a storyteller who speaks up and shows us the unsettling culture. And no matter how difficult it would be, we will come across someone like Malala Yousafzai. One day, if not now.

Middle

English is often called a "mixed" or even a "mongrel" language; the words come from a true hybrid of Saxon, Celtic, Latin, French, Norse and Greek.  

My recent reading turned out to be an intricate mix of Greek heritage or mythology. That's a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the mysterious title Middlesex.

The truly classic style of writing, paradoxical as it may seem, is the narrator voice of Cal telling the story of grandparents since 1922, all the way to Cal's birth in 1960. Back then, fetal sonogram was unheard of, and the next best thing to predict Cal's sex was a silver spoon dangling over the belly of Cal's mother. In what they claimed to be science, the silver spoon tied to a string twirled over the mother's belly, moving round and round in an Ouija-board way, until the path flattened to a direction that foretold Cal is a boy. "Koros!" The room erupted with shouts of "Koros, koros." 

The baby guessing appeared to be wrong by the time Cal was born. As far as the parents and doctors could tell, Cal was feminine. What they didn't realise was a tricky enzyme deficiency hitchhiking the journey of one paired chromosome numbered five. Cal's body doesn't produce dihydrotestosterone hormone. That means Cal followed a primarily female line of development despite the sex chromosome telling otherwise.  Cal was brought up around dolls, hair clips, full set of Madeline books, party dresses, the Easy-Bake Oven, the hula hoop.

That is how Cal was born twice: first a a baby girl with birth certificate name of Calliope Helen Stephanies; and then again, as a teenage boy, after which his driver's license recorded the first name as Cal.

Hang Seng

Picture a northwestern crow soaring to great heights, scanning coastal British Columbia for his breakfast treats. The crow loves Japanese littleneck clams the most. Once the crow locates the target molluscs, it picks up speed to dive-bomb at the mudflats and dig the clams out of the sticky ooze with their beaks.

The next code to crack is opening the shell without clam opener and forks. That's how the crow does. Shortly after flying with the heavy shells, the crow drops the clams on the nearby rocks. The trick works magic like shouting "open sesame." In case it doesn't work the first time, the crow retrieves it, flies it up in the air again, and drops it the second time. The third time. The fourth or even fifth time.

I'd never seen birds so clever in my entire life. I just heard this story from two Simon Fraser University scientists. The two scientists took a closer look at the crows and noticed something strange. The crows would occasionally drop the shell and leave it behind. Why on earth should a crow work so hard to dig up perfectly delicious clams only to abandon them halfway? One simple reason is the rejected clams were too small to warrant that much efforts to extract the breakfast. Another reason, to my dismay, is some scrounger crows simply lurk near the rocks to sweep in and steal the buffet meal. 

Think about the field "bioinspiration", and we can turn to these crows and learn from their knowledge gained over evolutionary time. We can think of those clam hunting behaviour as our money earning strategy or we can think of the scrounger crows as our thieves. Either way, it is irrefutable that we can learn a lot from them. Less experienced ones –  be they crows or humans – are vulnerable to be stolen. My family has had such bad experience, when the bank account password was stolen and cracked recently. Like a scrounger crow with free meal, the scammer took our money. Fighting back was less easy than what I'd expected. If you thought reporting to police immediately and the transaction could be halted, think twice. This is bad luck if you happened to have chosen a bank without heart to protect the customers, like us. Our bank customer service – and even if you wish not to call this a service at all – refused to disclose the account number of the scammer to the police.

My goodness, that is even worse than an animal. It's unprecedented. In all of human history. Shameful as it is to say, that's the worst bank service. 

Be warned.

James

If you could sit down and have dinner with anyone, who would it be?

If Mark Twain happened to be asked this question, his answer is most likely to be Percival Everett. Or vice versa.

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. I have enjoyed his new novel James, in which he re-invented Mark Twain's novel along the Mississippi River. You will never look at The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the same way again after reading James. The latter is a story told from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave and companion of Huck. 

You can call him Jim or James. You can hear Jim speak in nigger's way and in correct English. In private, Jim speaks and writes in perfect, formal English. In front of a white person, he speaks as every enslaved person does. 

Everett showed us the bilingual fluency of Jim who had reminded his daughter, "The only ones who suffer when the whites are made to feel inferior is us (blacks)."

Here is a perfect example of Jim's situational translations: While a slave is walking down the street and see that a white neighbour's kitchen is on fire. The neighbour is standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How should a slave tell the white neighbour?

"Fire, fire." That might have been what you suggest.

"Direct. And that's almost correct," Jim would correct you. The real answer should be "Lawdy, missum! Looky dere."

Why? Jim reminded us, "Because the whites need to know everything before niggers. Because they need to name everything."

    

Ursula

Improbable as it would have seemed to almost all biologists and animal behaviourists, a young king penguin named Ursula ventured into the open Atlantic Ocean in 2007 and launched a three-month journey toward an area off Antarctica. Statistically, one out of three would have died in the predator-dense danger zone where Ursula took the leap. 

I heard the story of Ursula on the first page of the book Wildhood co-authored by an evolutionary biologist and a science journalist. 

Ursula's story is legendary. Picture those massive jaws of leopard seals lurking offshore: they are lined with teeth like a tiger's. Visualise the hydrodynamic half-ton of explosive muscle, with action and precision like a missile's. You won't believe Ursula made the leap and swam ten kilometres a day – alive. 

Ursula wasn't the first penguin to jump or dive into the icy water. Many others wait at the water's edge, watching and learning from more experienced peers. They learn a great deal from what we call social learning. We all do. We can learn a lot from what our peers do right, and even from what they mess up. Watching bad things happen to one's cohorts provides a fish, bird, or mammal with lessons one can't get anywhere else. 

To the list of fish, bird, or mammal, I would add the rank of doctors. We doctors don't call that social learning; we call it shadowing, or assistant internship if you like. This happens every July.

Ruler

Summer time medical shadowing is one way for high school students to venture in the area of practicing doctors. This gives students a better idea what the career of a medical doctor is like. 

After a busy clinic with high school students sitting next to me today, I had a far less hard-pressed dinner time with them. We started off talking about dermatology specialty. And then the conversation moved on and they asked me about if and how artificial intelligence is going to eventually phase out the medical doctors. 

I don't know the answer but their questions remind us that the virtual brains are hitherto the size of a worm's. That means artificial intelligence works well with one narrow task at a time.  Deep convolutional neural networks, for example, can be trained by a dataset of hundreds of thousands of clinical images to achieve performance on par with board-certified dermatologists. That's a way to use artificial intelligence to tell the difference between healthy skin and skin cancer. So promising are those algorithms that even the scientific journal Nature published a proof-of-concept study on this topic.   

Wait a minute, you might be thinking. Did the pea-sized virtual brain make mistake? 

Yup. Sometimes, they did. One day the research team noticed something odd about the results: the machine was inadvertently trained to be a ruler detector instead. The rules-based algorithm was "smart" enough to find out skin cancer in the training data had been frequently photographed next to rulers for scale. 

Alas, the program turned out to call out loud "cancer" whenever there is a ruler.  

Butterfly

The suggestion that "don't judge a book by its cover" is not necessarily sage. Many a time a book's title draws readers in and gives us the first impression. 

The great thing about an intriguing book title is that it leaves us clue like Hansel's bread crumbs for Gretel. Recently, I had been unable to unlock the meaning of a book's title after reading more than four hundreds pages. That is a memoir from Evanna Lynch, best known for her casting as Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter film series. Evanna is courageous enough to tell her bumpy and dark journey with eating disorder in her publication The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting. As she acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple anorexia from self-hate.

The thing is, I didn't quite understand what Evanna's life has to do with butterfly. So, I kept reading. One chapter after another, there is no mention of the winged insect. Not even a moth.

I thought for the thousandth time how Evanna's body could have looked like a butterfly. 

And then, in the final chapter, I saw the symbolic meaning of her transformation. That life cycle is a legacy of awe-inspiring transformation from a teeny caterpillar out of a neat cluster of shiny, dandelion-yellow eggs. A magical transformation from an egg the size of a pinhead to crusty little cocoon, followed by a dancing butterfly with stunning beauty. 

How had I not noticed the similarity to the recovery of Evanna Lynch from her darkness in wrestling with an eating disorder?

All On the Board

Go to any Tube station across London and your eyes will move away from your smart device. Chances are, you have noticed minimal mobile signal coverage on the London Underground. 

That could have been the reason for two customer service assistants, Ian Redpath and Jeremy Chopra, to be able to catch the attention of passengers after posting a poem on the customer information board seven years ago. Everyone seemed to love the duo, and stopped to take selfies next to them.

Their quotes, poems, and inspiring words have reached more London commuters than any advertisement could have achieved. They have even published two books compiling their reflections, mostly on mental well-being. One good example is their wake-up call to our smart phones. 

"If your phone needs to be recharged, then so do you," they advised us. "Your phone is smart, but you're far smarter. Check yourself as much as you check your phone."

Euro 2024

What does "summer vacation" mean to you? To us, it means activities to indulge in with family and friends. Take a cue from each of them and we know what to do.

While we can't cater to everyone's wishes, we know the way to squeeze an extra stop or suggestion to make great times.

During our stay with my sister-in-law's family in a small city Coventry, we headed to Shakespeare's birthplace and flower fields when their boys were at school. (Hands up if you have boys who are fans of lavender fields or rose gardens. Any one?) After the kids came back from school, we took them to the country park but brought two footballs. Oh, and one more thing. In the country that invented the football game, the best way to spend our evening is, of course, to watch the quarter-finals of Euro 2024.

The way France captain Kylian Mbappé improvised his face mask to make it like Batman's, after a broken nose in the Austria game, reminds us how to make fun out of everything on the road.

Less

A few pounds overweight and about to turn fifty, Arthur Less is an American novelist who travelled to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India, and Japan. He appears in the fiction written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andrew Sean Greer. 

That’s an entertaining story for my Greece trip. Arthur Less felt strange to be almost fifty. It’s like, to quote his words, the last day in a foreign country. “You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.” 

Few metaphors can match the beauty of such comparison. What better ways to see how we face the stage of going-to-be-fifty?

On second thought, this isn’t a must to be so when we turn fifty. Or to leave a county, for that matter. For Arthur Less, he found his flight to be overbooked, and was happy to be volunteer to accept a flight later. 

It so happens that I was leaving Greece today. We remember the suggestion by The Rough Guide to Greece: “to go where Greeks go, often less obvious backstreet places that might not look much from outside but deliver the real deal.” Our family have been graced with the best travel companions who are from Greece. We ended up knowing the best ways to eat and drink at Athens and Chios ever since day one. 

We simply are wired to enjoy the country at its best.

Chios

Oliver Jeffers' picture books are remarkable – stunning, really. One of my favorites (and that of my daughter's) is The Day the Crayons Quit.

We all giggled when we read the colourful story of Duncan opening a box of crayons. One after another, Duncan's crayons protested and shouted aloud.

Imagine myself as the kid Duncan bringing the box of crayons to Greece, and I can immediately tell which crayon is going to be the most short-lived. And no prizes for guessing the blue crayon. That's right. The indigo blue water of the Aegean Sea, juxtaposed with clear sky of the vibrant summer in Greece.

My blue-coloured crayon is going to quit if I keep staying in the lovely Greek island of Chios.

Dive In

Nothing sparks awe and evokes magic quite like swimming wild. That’s what I was told when I happened to leaf through a book Why Swim Wild in Waterstones bookstore a week ago. You might have also heard the claim that wild water ignites that playful, childlike glee.

My Greek friends nodded in agreement. They took us on a speedboat at Chios today to show us the way wild water releases all the feel-good hormones and endorphins. If I have learnt one thing swimming in wild water, it is the saltiness of Aegean Sea. 

That reminds me of the interesting osmoregulation of sharks living in an environment of high salinity. To survive in salty seawater, sharks handle the challenge by maintaining high concentration of urea in their body fluids. If not because of urea, sharks can’t achieve a body osmolality similar to that of the ocean surrounding them. If not because of similar osmolality, the sharks could have died from “drying out” when water is lost by osmosis.

That also explains the unpleasant odour when a shark dies: their urea breaks downa nd is converted to ammonia. Yikes!

Caffeine

Anyone who's visited Greece knows the word “kafeneio.” It is their time-honoured tradition to serve coffee, brewed in a narrow-top pot, in a small cup.

I happened to have missed drinking coffee at Athens today, when I refused to take the (remaining) decaffeinated capsule at the apartment. By midday I had proved myself an addict on caffeine. My reading speed dwindled. Concentration came to a standstill. It took me a while to recognise it's a sign of caffeine withdrawal.

In the summer, when sunshine is guaranteed, I still opted to go outdoor to buy a cup of much-needed expresso. That is more to respect my caffeine craving than the high heat of Greek summer.

Durrells

We are taught to buckle our seat belts, lock our doors, arm our houses against intruders. We worry about the weather, obsess about cleaniness, block the mosquitoes and moths.

All this sounds complicated, and it is. But it is also important to break the rules now and then. Before I visited Greece, I borrowed a story book about the British naturalist Gerald Durrell's family moving to the Greek island of Corfu. Written over half a century ago, the autobiographical book My Family and Other Animals makes me laugh all the way from London to Athens. 

Gerald Durrell had been spending every second in his childhood to investigate animals like trapdoor spiders, rose-bettles or mantids. By no means does his field work imply Gerald Durrell is serious enough to follow rules. He seldom followed the rules made by parents or adults. Once upon a time he grew very fond of weird-looking scorpions with crooked legs, crablike claws and tail like a rose-thorn. He managed to catch some brief glimpses of scorpions' courtship and caught a scorpion family. With infinite care Gerald Durrell manoeuvred the mother scorpion and baby family into a match-box. After being distracted by lunch, he left the match-box in the drawing-room. He completely forgot about the exciting new captures during family meal time. 

It was not until Gerald's brother fetched the cigarettes and picked up the match-box that the mother scorpion was allowed to escape. She seized the rare opportunity to hoist herself out of the box with lighting speed. This came perilously close to being a medieval duel. The scorpion strike and sting soon escalated into a pandemonium even worse than the Ukraine war. With a flick of his hand, Gerald's brother sent the scorpion flying down the table. One Durrell family member after another let out scream by the time a scorpion landed on them. Hysteria ensued. 

That's a bloodily amusing scene. 

London

With hundreds of thousands of Swifties heading to Wembley Stadium for the superstar Taylor Swift show, our family arrived at London one day ahead of her record-breaking Eras Tour at the capital city.

The joy of revisiting London, after my last one almost ten years ago, is not limited to my daughter's affection for the artist singer. With so much to see and do in London, my time-pressed travel during the conference last time has left plenty of to-do-list unchecked. 

The National Gallery and bookstore Waterstones were closed by the time my conference ended then. I was able to visit both this time. Yeah.

Hamilton

I hope you'll pardon me for not knowing Alexander Hamilton: I didn't study American history and haven't heard of George Washington's aide-de-camp in the Continental Army until my recent London trip.

When a good friend of our family bought us tickets for the multi-award winning musical based on the life of Hamilton, I borrowed the biography written about this man. The eight-hundred-page biography by Ron Chernow attests to the rise of an illegitimate orphan from the Caribbean. He was probably born in 1755 in the West Indies, where he was "surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people." His mother was unhappily married, and was soon deserted by Hamilton's father. With determined pursuit, six months after starting his self-education, Hamilton passed the bar exam at the age of twenty-seven and was licensed as an attorney before the New York State Supreme Court.

The rest of his story has led us to think about the Gatsby curve; that is about the height of economic ladder rungs. The farther apart each rung becomes, the much more difficult to climb. If not because Hamilton was born more than two hundred years ago, he could not have become the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Not any more. With time, the degree of income or status inequalities has climbed higher and higher. That means our economic prospects are determined by our parents' wealth rather than our own success.

Bookstore

Eating pizza doesn't make us Italian, any more than playing baseball turns Japanese into Americans. That said, I concede that, visiting London can turn you into a book-lover. Indeed, reading culture is deep-seated in London. So much so that we see bookworms everywhere in London, from underground to cafeteria. 

That's why our family headed to London's famous bookstore on the very morning of arrival, even before we think of Westminister Abbey. 

The Edwardian bookshop close to where we're staying, Daunt Books, is arguably the most beautiful one in London. It boasts long oak gallaries and stained-glass windows, and is home to travel guides and literature arranged by country. A bookstore so large, so thrilling, and so inspiring that we spent more than an hour.

I daresay that visiting bookstore like Daunt Books or Foyles is a must when you visit London.

Tranquility

If you happen to be an amateur birder, you may have the habit of chasing kingfisher like me. What draws kingfishers to be watched again and again come from their bright plumage and strikingly fast flight. 

As if to further cement my passion of kingfisher, I have learned about its connection with the Shinkansen bullet train during my viewing a virtual conference in Milan today. 

Eiji Nakatsu, like so many other of us with a passion for birdwatching, has been the engineer looking after the technical development of the Japanese high-speed bullet trains. He wasn't the first person to be frustrated by the noise and vibration created by their trains. So much so that sonic booms were heard by residents 400 metres away from the train tunnel. And then Eiji got his eureka moment after being inspired by kingfisher's vertical high-speed dive silent enough to score ten in the Olympic diving events. He was curious enough to explore the shape of its bill. In other words, the key is to prevent buildup of pressure wave by reducing the cross-sectional area of the Shinkansen. 

Eiji finally figured out to redesign the nose of bullet train like the bill of kingfishers. That's a romantic story of biomimicry to reduce power, fuel, money spent, and yet, create a quieter journey.

Reset

Does there come a day in every man's life when he finds a transition from the upslope straight line to a peak and then decline? I can't be alone in this, can I?

The pattern is universal, according to the social scientist Arthur Brooks who wrote From Strength to Strength. After the age of fifty, you might find your reaching peak performance. Your decisions might not be as crisp as they once were. Your instincts are less reliable. Your productivity isn't as high.

Maybe you can relate to the decline mentioned by Arthur Brooks. I can (yes, it hurts). And I realised that I have also experienced a diminishing skill to recall names. Is it true that, by the time we're fifty, our brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library? The answer is: Yes. Mind you, your personal research librarian is also getting creaky, slow, and easily distracted. This is part of the story of growing old, and I wish it was not, but it is.

I won't kick myself for forgetting the name of any acquaintance, or even the name of my patient for that matter. Years ago, I could precisely name each and every patient of mine. I can't now. I know I shouldn't regret. This is what Arthur Brooks has taught me. As we age, we should not cry for the decline in our fluid intelligence (such as the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems); we are simply entering a life reset to gain our crystallized intelligence (referring to the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past).

To go back to the metaphor of a vast library, we won't have to regret how slow the librarian is. This does not matter. What matters is that we marvel at the size of the book collection our librarian is wandering around in.

Chocolate

When my friend returned from her Swiss trip, she brought us chocolate resembling the iconic Matterhorn Glacier. That's pyramid-shaped chocolate with a dash of white colour at the top.

That reminds me of the memoir of Trevor Noah, who was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother. As a kid, Trevor didn't know what race was. To him, people were like different types of chocolate. His dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and he was the the milk chocolate.

True, life is a box of chocolate. I like the way Trevor thinks we're all just chocolate. 

Simple and fair. 

Carrie

For the past few years, the American author Taylor Jenkins Reid has been carving out a unique literary space, mostly novels of women characters. And it's almost impossible to read them without wondering if you're reading a biography or a fictional story. Nowhere is this better illustrated than byThe Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. The story character is so real. So much so that I think it has come from the journalist work of Walter Isaacson.

Taylor Jenkins Reid's recent novel Carrie Soto is Back is even more authentic. Carrie Soto is a fictional tennis superstar who simply wanted to be the greatest tennis player in the world. When her friend suggested that joy was more important, she laughed. "Winning is joy," she said.

Carrie Soto, once the leading figure in women's tennis with a record of winning Grand Slam titles for twenty times, retired at 31. She decided on a comeback at 37, when another upcoming tennis player had tied that record. To reclaim the world record for most Grand Slam singles titles, Carrie returned to play all four Grand Slam events, including the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Over the course of her lifetime, she was living in the dream that her body or skills didn't have an expiration date.

At the end of each chapter, I'd have to remind myself that being the very best is antithetical to being happy, but in the next chapter Carrie would convince us otherwise. Such debate, to and fro, is like moving our head right and left, left and right, chasing the tennis ball. By itself, it's downright satisfying. This is the reward for reading Taylor Jenkins Reid's book. 

The pearl didn't all come from Carrie's obsession; the rebuttal from her friend or opponent is entertaining. Competing against people half her age, as her friend mentioned, is going to face people with brand-new knees, brand-new everything including brand-new hearts. I love the metaphor about old hearts: It's like an old mattress that's been bounced on so many times that now, if you put your hand on it, it leaves a permanent imprint. Just a big old mattress showing every dent.

DPC

Historical fiction is often the most gripping witness to war. My recent favorite is Kristin Hannah's The Women, which takes me to the Vietnam War around 1967.

One of the women in this fiction is a twenty-year-old nurse Frances McGrath who joined the Army Nurse Corps. Let us not forget, indeed, that women can be heroes. 

The story of this green nurse Frances McGrath in Vietnam is all blood and sweats. Her workplace was an operating table on wheels, and she lived in the middle of nowhere. There were bits of shrapnel embedded everywhere, cyring casualties, moaning and shouting medics. Frances had never performed a tracheotomy before, but she'd watched and assisted on dozens within one year of joining the hospital. One day, she was facing a dying soldier who could barely breathe. He looked sucked dry, hollowed-out, with sunken eyes and sunken cheeks characteristic of the prisoners of war. The gasping soldier struggled and probably couldn't make it. Frag wounds had torn up his arms and neck, and there was probably something swollen or lodged in his airway. 

"What are you doing, McGrath?" the doctor asked.

"Letting him say goodbye to his friends and die in peace." 

"Be quick. I've got a sucking chest wound that needed you ten minutes ago."

Frances McGrath felt sad, and decided to change into clean gloves and wiped the soldier's neck with antiseptic solution. Holding her scalpel, she took a breath to steady herself, then made a cut between the thyroid and cricoid cartilage.

The dying man took a deep, wheezing breath, with relief coming into his eyes. Frances took hold of his hand, held it in hers, and leaned close, whispering, "You must be a good man. Your friends are here."

The soldier took his last breath, and went still.

That was her way of facing a never-ending fight of wartime Whac-A-Mole. Once a wounded soldier was settled (or sent to morgue), another would be brought in. That was a fact of life.

During the Vietnam War, Frances McGrath saw everything from amputations to rat bites to what's left of a soldier after a land mine (many of which were planted with sharpened sticks and coated with human feces to assure both deep wound and infection when stepped on). Most wounds require delayed primary closure – DPC – which means the medic clear and debride wounds but don't close. The wait – at least four to five days – before wound closure offers time for the human host defense system to decrease the bacterial load. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything, be they words or healing sessions, that could bring closure to the wound suffered by Frances McGrath.

GUP

I kept being amused by Steven Rowley’s novel The Guncle this week. 

Funny as it may sound, the fiction character name refers to a 43-year-old former sitcom star Patrick. Or else, you can call him Gay Uncle Patrick. Or, GUP, for short. 

Patrick had to be a guardian of two children, a niece and a nephew, who kept acting out. They were either using outdoor voices inside or asking for YouTube, even on an airplane. 

After the nine-year-old niece Maisie refused to order off the kid’s menu – because she said she’s not a kid – Patrick set his own menu down and reminded Maisie of something wise. 

"Don’t be in such a hurry to be older. You’re going to spend the rest of your life wishing you were younger."

Although the last sentence doesn’t count as one of "Guncle Rules", that’s certainly a truism. So true. You don’t know what you’re missing till it’s gone.

Patrick, as a matter of fact, learned that the hard way, when he wrote a letter to his partner only after he was killed by a drunk driver.

Comedian

No manual of writing style that I know has a word to say of good humour; and yet, for me, a fiction about a comedian can sometimes be the most awkward theme to have laughable ideas.

It's a difficult subject, and try as you might, there is no way to make this sort of story a reading pleasure.

Not that the author Dolly Alderton thought it that way. She has written Good Material, a modern-day story of love and break-up; one of the main characters, Andy, is a comedian. 

In case you don't know, being a comedian isn't going to guarantee a Get Out of Jail Free card. A comedian is no different from anyone else who can have the blues. Or, even bluer.

The way Dolly Alderton wrote about a couple who broke up after four years makes us see the nightmare after romance. More than two-third of the book is speaking from the voice of a male comedian Andy, who lay awake after the break-up, thinking all the times about his ex-girlfriend Jen. He kept scrolling through the WhatsApp messages over the previous four years. Or else, an obsessive Insta-stalking.

It wasn't until the last few chapters that Dolly Alderton changed the voice to that of Jen. We then heard about the story of Jen trying to catfish Andy after their break-up. She set up an email address and then a believable Instagram account for a woman called Tash. That's how Andy was being tricked into responding to a message request from a girl, @Tash_x_x_x_, followed by all the flirting and funny conversations. The rest is history.

YA Fiction

Picture yourself staying home with your teenage daughter on a rainy day. What would you do? I knew I have to figure out the answer myself, as my wife is out of town. I decided to borrow the fiction book The Fault in Our Stars from my daughter, and watched the film adaptation together. Pretty sweet torture, right? It is. 

I read the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster who suffered from thyroid cancer spreading to her lungs. The cancer treatment gave her ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks; the satellite colony in her lungs made her carry cylinders of oxygen weighing a few pounds. That sucks. Totally.

When Hazel was told, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicked in and she figured that’s one in five … so she looked around the cancer support group and thought: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

It’s disheartening.

Issac was another patient within the cancer support group. He had retinoblastoma. To keep him alive, he had to have his eyes taken out. This is what hell would be like, his whole life without light. He told his surgeon that he’d rather be deaf than blind. If and only if he had the choice. Issac was, unfortunately, left with the only choice, according to his cancer surgeon, that eye cancer wasn’t going to make him deaf. 

Next, there is the story of Augustus walking with a prosthetic leg after osteosarcoma treatment, losing ground sometimes. He was the best friend of Hazel and Issac. Augustus had to learn driving left-footed, and failed the driving test three times. He passed in his fourth driving test, probably thanks to something called cancer perks. That refers to the little things cancer kids get that regular kids don’t: free passes on late homework, basketballs signed by sports heroes, and unearned driver’s licenses.

I admit – this is a fiction written for teenagers. But as it turns out, the story breaks the heart of adults too.

Insult

Digital communciation is one of the most common channels for discussion. Whenever we can't (and often we can't) talk face to face, we make use of the live chat, emails, text messaging or voicemail.

What many people don't realize is that navigating the digital communication – and being successful in getting the message across – is a herculean task. If there's one thing you should know about the pitfall, it's the way to respond to an insult.

I soon came to realize that I am not the only one who had been having difficulty with coming up with a perfect witty reply. An article in this month's issue of Time magazine taught me the way to shut down the dialogue instead of being nervous after sensing a threat. 

Many a time I wished to fight back like a dingo slashing a bloodied wombat and dropping it in front of people. That doesn't work and isn't wise. Don't fight back. Smile.

The two most useful replies I'd learned from the Time magazine include: "I don't get it. Can you explain the joke?" and "What a wild thing to say out aloud."

Either of them is a reply that I'm sure sends shivers down the spine of anyone who dares to insult me.

Try it next time and you will laugh and laugh and laugh and wonder who is happier, the one who insults or you.

Cassava

A commonly quoted reason for working memory failure is overload. We try to hang onto too much, and then push our memory past its limits. No less important than overload is mind-wandering. We're grabbed by some attention-seeking thoughts and our mind gets hijacked.

The question, for me, is how many books I should start reading. One after another? Different books at the same time? Once again, this is a question I don't have the answer but I tend to be promiscuous, for that matter.

Two days ago, I was reading about the intriguing streams of paralyzed patients, most of them on crutches or carried by relatives, arriving at Hans Rosling's clinic in Mozambique. They all told the same story: suddenly, both their legs had become useless. No pain, no fever and no other symptoms. The number of new cases was doubling every week. They felt like a television set with bad reception; nobody knew what was happening, and started to move the antenna around and bang on one side and then the other hoping the picture would improve. Could that be polio? Or biological warfare? None of this seems very likely, does it? 

Hans Rosling was flummoxed.

At the same time, I was in the middle of reading another book Sleeping Beauties written by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner. He taught me the multitalented molecules developed by plants. One of the superpower chemcial defence armaments is cyanogenic molecules. The name says it all. When an animal or human takes a bite out of a plant containing such a molecule, the molecule releases cyanide. That's the same lethal poison used by the Nazis in the gas chambers of Auschwitz – that much I was certain of. I've never heard about cassava or manioc tubers – staple foods in African countries including Mozambique – which contain such molecules. Macabre as it was, the Africans will get poisoned and become paralyzed after eating cassava unless the tubers are cooked or soaked.

When Hans Rosling drew up detailed maps of the geographical spread of the paralysis epidemic, there were several striking findings. First, it emerged that the disease hit children in particular but none under the age of two. Second, the majority of victims got paralysis during the summer period of no rainfall. It didn't take long for Hans Rosling to find out that the indigenous people could have left the cassava in the ground, hoping for rain but in vain. They soon pulled up cassava – neither cooked nor soaked – when they got nothing to eat. 

That's how people get the cyanide-releasing poisons.

A truly eye-opening read.

Poverty

It's hard for us to imagine the life in Mozambique with a shockingly high child mortality rate. It's even harder for me to read the stories haranguing the Swedish doctor Hans Rosling serving an emergency clinic in Mozambique.

Better known for writing another bestselling book Factfulness, Hans Rosling has written a memoir How I Learned to Understand the World. 

I admitted that his stories are indeed opening our eyes to poverty outside our comfort zone. And it is impossible to read without ooh and ahh. 

One late afternoon in the hospital, Hans Rosling met an elderly with a leg fractured, as carried in by her two sons. The ends of the broken bone were protruding through her skin. There were no X-ray machine and he had run out of anaesthetics. Hans Rosling had not much choice; he asked two nurses take hold of the patient under her armpits and the strongest junior nurse to pull the foot in the opposite direction. After much grappling, he managed to line up the fracture surfaces and close the wound, stitch the skin margins and put her entire limb in a plaster cast. 

Next morning, the patient insisted on leaving hospital, when she was not supposed to put any weight on the leg. I could imagine furrowed brows of Hans Rosling, who tried to explain in sign language, in vain. He then discovered that something had gone very wrong: the immobilised foot was pointing sideways instead of forward. He simply forgot to check alignment before putting on a plaster cast. To his chagrin, he could not persuade the patient to let him reset the foot.

"Doctor, my hens might get stolen so I have to leave," the old lady insisted. 

Hans Rosling never saw her again but learned later she had survived. The plaster had cracked and fallen off after a month and her foot was utterly misaligned. That badly shaped foot didn't bother the patient as long as her chickens were all right.

"When you work in a place of extreme poverty, don't try to do things perfectly," said his mentor who had been a mission doctor all her life. "All you will accomplish is wasting time and resources that could be put to better use."

That's a lesson Hans Rosling learned from the old lady too.

Anniversary

One thing that puzzled me during our plan of celebrating the 24th wedding anniversary was all the coinciding with official release of Taylor Swift's 11th studio album. I joked about Taylor Swift choosing to celebrate our big day.

Taylor's new album is likened to a new star in the galaxy, and her music has been a global phenomenon. 

My daughter, like all other Swifties, has been head over heels for her, and more so in the days leading up to the release of "The Tortured Poet Department". Out of loyalty to their favorite singer, Swifties refused to listen to the songs leaked online early. Because of school schedule, my daughter had to wait few hours after the album's arrival to start listening. She made promise not to log into any social media during lunch break in case of spoilers.

As it turns out, one of the celebration events for our wedding anniversary yesterday was to drive to my daughter's school and pick up two Swifties to our home – to make the history. In case you don't know, Taylor's album takes less than 12 hours to break this year's record for most single-day Spotify streams.

Mental

The story of Michael Laudor, as told by acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen, was heartrending. The author, Michael’s closest childhood and lifelong friend, wrote a story spanning 50 years which took me two weeks to finish. 

In terms of language prowess and intelligence, Michael Laudor could take pride in his encyclopaedia recall, like reading a book in one sitting without losing a word. He read faster than Rosen, remembered more, and processed information more quickly. 

The way Michael studied was not for the faint of hearts. His roommate had to move out because Michael never put his reading light out no matter how often he was asked or how late it got. He ended up inheriting a room of his own, which everyone in the college called “psycho singles.” 

During his first semester at Yale with Rosen, Michael had made a dive into a thorny debate with a Harvard professor who wanted Black parents to decide for themselves whether their kids got bused to majority-white schools or stayed close to home where, Michael warned, they would “suffer from the loss of an integrated environment.” Michael published a long letter in The New York Times defending the racial balance in public schools. Michael had superior intellectual ability. We took it for granted that Michael would rise to scholar status. It never occurred to us that he might one day became the man who needed to be judged as whether to be integrated or to be locked. 

He graduated from Yale Law School with summa cum laude honors despite suffering from schizophrenia. “Either you welcomed people with disabilities to the table,” he later wrote, “or you cast them out like lepers shunned in earlier times.” His story made us think again the way to help people with mental health problems. That’s something even bright guy like Michael doesn’t know the answer.

Out of the Box

I happened to be reading Ozan Varol's book two days ago, when I was on call looking after patients with kidney disease. As a rocket scientist turned award-winning author, Ozan Varol championed moving out of our comfort zone. That means taking off the training wheels and moving away from the familiar path.

One of my call duties was to look after and orchestrate kidney transplant from a brain death donor after a tragic traffic accident. My two patients were waiting for the new kidneys. They didn't speak much, and somewhere in the background rose the ticking of the clock in our medical ward, an unwavering rhythm of stability, sharply at odds with the uncertainty on their faces. I was counting my fingers. We weren't sure how long the wait would be. Waiting, for my patients on dialysis, was a bitter cocktail of aching awareness, visceral pain, and mental crush.

The organs had already been taken out of the road crash victim's body for over ten hours. I didn't want to disclose too much to the two taciturn kidney transplant candidates how we are in a race against the clock as soon as a kidney was recovered and placed on ice. Patients should not be bothered with the science that kidneys would start to degrade during the high-stakes window called cold ischaemic time. Yes, prolonged cold storage of kidneys inside the box is no laughing matter – there are starving kidneys at stake – but, hard as we tried, our operating rooms were all occupied with emergency surgery that afternoon.

Ozan Varol reminds me the pitfall of managing uncertainty. In other words, our brain often steers us toward the seemingly safest path – inaction. The brain, to paraphrase psychologist Rick Hanson, is like Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive.

To overcome the uncertainty, my urologist friend and I quickly threw away the training wheels and old rules. We tried out best to generate as many new ideas as we could. So we explored the idea of transporting the kidney organ and patient to another hospital nearby, where we can operate. Before we worked out the plan in more detail, we were told the availability of operation room in our hospital. Not one but two. If we followed our tradition like what we have been doing for the last twenty years, we would have sent the first patient to have the kidney transplant operation, and then the next one. One after another. Such tendency to follow the tradition isn't too wrong, but it means another few hours' wait for the second kidney. We knew the kidneys' quality would be better if we can beat the clock. At the end of the day, we were able to gather more than six hardworking surgeons, not to mention two teams of anaesthetists, to carry out two kidney transplant operations in parellel. Wait. I shouldn’t say “at the end of the day”; our transplant surgery started at one in the very early morning.

I am really grateful. Two days later, I am still telling it.

Dead

Unlike buying cinema tickets, on-demand streaming platform lets us enjoy more movies than we can imagine. The good part about the streaming service is that there's always chance to stop and switch.

When our family first picked the superhero movie Deadpool today, we didn't realise the bloody violence scenes throughout the story based on the Marvel Comics. That unsettled us. So much so that we stopped watching within the first ten minutes.

We were disappointed, but not for long. We went for another movie, Dead Poets Society, which was released in 1989. Looking back, I think we have made a smart choice out of the two movies, both starting with "Dead". The classic Dead Poets Society tells the story of an English teacher, Keating the "O Captain! My Captain!". Keating loved encouraging his students to go with their hearts instead of pursuing conformity. His philosophy of carpe diem, obviously, won't be accepted by the older generations. That's why one of the parents wanted to cut his son's extracurricular activities at all costs. He simply wished his son to study hard for his chemistry or science lessons. Some lesson are harder to learn that others, and the one for his son Neil Perry - that acting is more meaningful than studying medicine - was tragic for all parties.

The movie brought tears to our eyes in the family, and if the story of Keating and Neil doesn’t break your heart, well, I don’t know what will.

Exercise

How many of us have dreamt of living better longer? I know I have.

Today, voluminous research has shown that mortality is an inevitable companion of aging and chipping away one disease at a time is futile, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The good news, though, is that exercise is the most potent pro-longevity "drug". I was introduced to this strategy by Peter Attia in his eye-opening book Outlive. In short, medicine's biggest failing is in attempting to treat all the conditions at the wrong end of the timescale - after they are entrenched - rather than before they take root.

The beauty of maintaining health by exercise is to make us functionally younger. If anything, we exercise to live longer with good function and without chronic disease, and with a briefer period of morbidity at the end of our lives. The upside of training to improve our VO₂ max during physical exertion is huge. One study found that boosting elderly subjects' VO₂ max by about 25 percent was equivalent to subtracting twelve years from their age.

What better drug can give us such payoff? 

True

For years, we love reading crime stories or psychological thrillers.

Unsettling as they're, these fictions give us irresistible pleasure from the adrenaline swooshing through the bloodstream, not to mention the Hitchcockesque entertainment of decoding mystery.

It would be easy, and oh so helpful, for authors to stick to the theme of telling lies. My daughter finished One of Us is Lying not long ago. I just read None of This is True.  

All these books are destined to end with a maze twisted by the somewhat sickening knots of truths and untruths. All of which is to say, deception is an endless trick to make stories riveting. A bit frightening, perhaps. 

Luckily, we have more truths than lies in our real life. For me, at least.

Ando

I doubt many outside the field of architecture have heard of Tadao Ando. Few inside the field, somehow, know that he was born in poverty, had been raised by his grandmother and was a boxer, before he started teaching himself architecture. I learrned his story from Adam Grant's book Hidden Potential.  

As the only architect ever to win all four of the field's most prestigious prizes, his success has come with an asterisk. Without means to go to college, Ando borrowed architecture books from friends and taught himself enough to earn an architecture license. 

By the time he has become the master of light and concrete, he has identified his goal. "What some other people think of my work is not my prime mover," he says. "It's my desire to satisfy me, and to challenge myself."

That's contrary to what most of us have in mind. One could take the view – and I would bet that many do – that it's important to meet other people's expectation. Like Ando, Adam Grant reminds us it's better to disappoint others than to disappoint ourselves. It's more about living up to our own standards.

To visualise what we're facing, Adam Grant makes use of a soccer pitch diagram to depict the size of people we try to please. For that matter, the penalty area inside the whole pitch are somewhat representing the percentage of people we can actually please. And then, an even smaller square – the goal area – refers to the proportion of people (including yourself, of course) we should focus on pleasing. 

That reminds me of my pacing during my run after work. I seldom join running competition. I run myself. My pace, interestingly, goes up after seeing guys riding bike next to me. That's extrinsic goal to drive me. To beat the odds. And, most importantly, to beat myself.